Re: [PATCH 5/5] writeback, memcg: Implement foreign dirty flushing

From: Tejun Heo
Date: Wed Aug 21 2019 - 12:00:43 EST


Hello,

On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 06:02:56PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> 1) You ask to writeback LONG_MAX pages. That means that you give up any
> livelock avoidance for the flusher work and you can writeback almost
> forever if someone is busily dirtying pages in the wb. I think you need to
> pick something like amount of dirty pages in the given wb (that would have
> to be fetched after everything is looked up) or just some arbitrary
> reasonably small constant like 1024 (but then I guess there's no guarantee
> stuck memcg will make any progress and you've invalidated the frn entry
> here).

I see. Yeah, I think the right thing to do would be feeding the
number of dirty pages or limiting it to one full sweep. I'll look
into it.

> 2) When you invalidate frn entry here by writing 0 to 'at', it's likely to get
> reused soon. Possibly while the writeback is still running. And then you
> won't start any writeback for the new entry because of the
> atomic_read(&frn->done.cnt) == 1 check. This seems like it could happen
> pretty frequently?

Hmm... yeah, the clearing might not make sense. I'll remove that.

Thanks.

--
tejun